


a mother knows.

by agentmaine



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), a crown of candy (series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24663655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmaine/pseuds/agentmaine
Summary: [SPOILERS FOR A CROWN OF CANDY EPISODE 9.]a mother's senses let queen caramelinda know what has happened to her oldest daughter before anyone can really tell her."She is lucky in the fact that she is alone, in a room locked and hidden away, for now, because the moment her eldest daughter dies, Queen Caramelinda feels it in the pit of her stomach and knows, without shadow of a doubt, that something truly terrible has happened. It twists like the knife that she doesn’t yet know was plunged into her daughter’s stomach, a sharp, burning, focused pain that ebbs and flows outwards in a hollow reverberation."
Relationships: Caramelinda Rocks/Lazuli Rocks, Jet Rocks & Ruby Rocks, jet rocks & caramelinda rocks
Comments: 9
Kudos: 61





	a mother knows.

They say a mother’s love is the greatest of all. They say that mothers know everything - eyes in the back of their heads to find that sneaky little hand in the cookie jar, the uncanny knowledge of where their darling left their favourite toy, a foreboding sense of danger that stops an over-enthused child from running head-first into trouble, the healing power of a kiss on a scraped knee. They say that, and they’re right.

When the light leaves Jet Rocks’ eyes and the life floods out of her in sticky sweetness onto the shaking palms of Liam Wilhelmina’s hands; when the glowing warmth of the Locket of the Sweetest Heart flickers out like a dying candle, deaf to Ruby Rocks’ desperate pleas for just a moment more; when Amethar the Unfallen sees it extinguish and sets the ground ablaze in the burning furnace of his immediate, earth-shattering grief: Queen Caramelinda of the House of Rocks does not have to be with any of them in person to know what has happened.

She is alone in the castle, as she has spent so many of the past years of her life. She knows something has gone wrong, with the crescendoing sounds of violence breaking the aching silence of the grand halls of this place they’ve called home. She is lucky in the fact that she is alone, in a room locked and hidden away, for now, because the moment her eldest daughter dies, Queen Caramelinda feels it in the pit of her stomach and knows, without shadow of a doubt, that something truly terrible has happened. It twists like the knife that she doesn’t yet know was plunged into her daughter’s stomach, a sharp, burning, focused pain that ebbs and flows outwards in a hollow reverberation. It takes a hold of her lungs and crushes them bit by bit, until all she can do is stumble to the floor, bent double and gasping for air in near-silent horror, a hand clutched across her stomach - the stomach that held her girls for 9 long months, anxious to meet them; the stomach that feels another twist of a knife, as if her sweet girls were never for a moment disconnected from her body.

Just over eighteen years before, when Jet and Ruby were placed into her arms for the very first time, Caramelinda, in an instant, knew that they were the greatest thing to ever happen to her. Two tiny bundles of sweet joy, both of their faces scrunched up and wailing in protest of being introduced to the outside world, so bright and loud and confusing. Caramelinda did not blame them for a moment for their misery was well-founded. Who would choose to enter a world like this, so uncertain and cruel and shaky in it’s footsteps, only just settling into an era of peace? She knows she has brought them into a life that will not be kind to them, one marked with the heavy burden of status. For her oldest,  _ Jet _ ,  _ they’ve decided to call her _ , the weight of the crown is to rest heavy on her head and heavier on her shoulders, years down the line. She knows that this sweet girl did not ask for this.

(She knows that may be the one thing their family have in common: not one of them did.)

There are two girls in her arms, though, and perhaps it is foolish optimism to believe this but in this moment she does, fuelled by a new sort of love, one she had only spent the past 9 months dreaming of: maybe, if they are lucky, the burden of a crown carried alone can be shared, in this new world. Her sweet Jet will have to marry, of course, just like she did and  _ aren’t we so similar already, my little one,  _ she thinks - but she has a tie stronger than any union of politics. She has Ruby, her wonderful wide-eyed Ruby, calmer now than Jet is, with her eyes still wet with tears trying to look around the room, settling on her father’s face with something that could be called wonder. Her two girls have not spent a moment apart. Her two girls will grow up together in a place with high walls and as much safety as Caramelinda can allow herself to believe exists, and even though that isn’t enough, she knows that she will put measures in place to scrape the barrel of false security and drain every bit.

It is so strange, a mother’s love. At once, Caramelinda is softened to the core, with so much devotion and adoration that she doesn’t know where to put it, that it feels like it might break her. At the same moment, as she looks to her husband’s face and sees the same awe, the power of the rawest form of love rolling over him again and again, she knows she has to harden. She has to be strong, brave, smart, harsh, even cruel, if necessary. Caramelinda knows her husband well and she knows, in that moment, that sacrifices will have to be made to keep her most precious gifts safe.

And Caramelinda, through the years, time and time and time again, is the one to step up and make those decisions. Amethar bends like putty at the hands of his girls. They have him wrapped around their little fingers, two pairs of syrup-sweet eyes blinking up at him with gap-toothed smiles and he would give them the world on a dinner plate, if they asked. She can’t afford such childish hope. And so, in the cruel ways of fate, she becomes the  _ mean  _ parent, the  _ harsh _ parent, the  _ no-fun all-rules  _ parent who makes her girls sit in their classes, tries again and again to teach them that this world will not bend at their will in the way their father insists it can, tries to reign them in, clip their wings, do  _ anything  _ to keep them within her reach and safe and alive.

It fails, of course. They’re their father’s daughters, after all.

Jet and Ruby grow and grow apart from her, but a mother’s love persists. Not a day passes where Caramelinda isn’t so proud of them that it hurts. Caramelinda is not a stupid woman, not one bit, and she knows that she fails in her duty to show them her love, sometimes. The woman she sits on the throne as is not the woman she always was, but time is precious and remembrance takes up so much of it, and she has to persist. Her husband is a King but only in name and without her steady mind, their kingdom would be in ruins. So she fulfills her role - it hurts, of course, to be the parent most efficiently put to blame, a scapegoat for her girl’s problems and dampened dreams. 

It hurts to see the longing in Jet and Ruby’s eyes, for their deepest desire to be nothing more than the sweet release of freedom. It hurts more that she cannot give this to them - so she gives what she can. She wishes she remembered the words to the language of gentle love that she once spoke so fluently, but times change and mould the people swept up in them to their curves and angles. She gives what she can and takes it, too - she knows twinspeak by the time the girls are eleven, learnt not so much from eavesdropping and  _ trying  _ to learn but from the simple act of paying attention in a way that only mothers seem to be able to.

(She never tells them she knows it, of course. She doesn’t listen in to most of their conversations, allowing them the privacy that life cannot often afford them. She tunes her ear in sometimes, though - how else would she always manage to get them the gifts they forget they even asked for?)

That can only go so far, though, and eventually she humanises herself to them in any way possible, telling them on their sixteenth birthday about the twists and turns of her own life, how the crown was not made for her, how she was not destined for their father, how life will cut you down and watch you bleed if you don’t tread with such meticulous care.

When Caramelinda sits down with her daughters, a hand holding each of theirs’,  _ and they do love her, so much, they’re just so young and one day they’ll see _ , and she tells them of Lazuli - now that they’re old enough to understand - she watches a dawning realisation light up their eyes in a moment of unbridled awe. It’s followed by a tidal wave of questions that, for all the pain it causes, she is  _ so  _ happy to answer, to tell the two loves of her life about  _ her  _ love, the one they’ll never meet but already know so much about. She shares tales of their courtship and watches the girls watch in starry-eyed wonder, the three of them all holding hands, now, a circle connected and Lazuli has never felt so close, Lazuli has never felt so far away. It explains things to the girls: why their mother is so harsh, why their father so hurt, why their parents regard each other as nothing more than allies, why, for all the love she has for him, she can never be  _ in love _ with Amethar.

It doesn’t fix their relationship overnight, of course. She is the mother of teenagers: of  _ course  _ they butt heads, of course they argue, of course she has to watch over them and reign them in, still. Of course, Amethar remains fun and carefree in a way that she can never be, in a way that she could never bring herself to take away from him, when she sees how it makes him smile. But there’s an understanding, there, an underlying knowledge that their family is formed not out of choice but out of necessity, that their family is bound together by love and loss and the grips of power beyond their control. There’s an understanding that grief runs through their veins, passed in their bloodline as much as Candian’s sugar is, and that they owe so much to women they’ll never meet.

For a while, Caramelinda had thought she’d done enough. That could never be the case, though, could it? After all, by now, she should realise life wouldn’t award her that. It has never been that kind to her.

The Queen of Candia is not new to the world of grief she feels herself stepping into, because she  _ knows _ , she knows her daughter is dead, she  _ knows  _ it is Jet and she cannot explain why but of  _ course  _ she knows, they’re her girls, her two wonders, her two true points of devotion, her stars in the sky. Jet is her firstborn child, the heir to the throne, and isn’t it so cruel that Caramelinda has been made to witness the fall of five potential queens? Candia’s heirs, one by one, taken away from her.

The first loss was Lazuli, of course. Lazuli, the love of her life. Archmage Lazuli who she can only remember in quiet moments because twenty years has not dulled that ache. Archmage Lazuli who was so clever, so bold, so strong, so busy. Archmage Lazuli, who still had time to fall in love with her, all while her head was in the present and the countless plans she had to work on, all while her head was here and in the future and the other and the other and the other. She was so gentle, was her wonderful Lazuli. 

She remembers talking to her, the most common thing to ask:  _ “where are you right now, Laz?” _

The most common answer:  _ “most importantly, with you.” _

It was a lie, of course. But it was a kind one, and Caramelinda was grateful for it.  _ Is  _ grateful for it - even bent double on the floor, the Queen corrects herself. It feels wrong to think about the woman who could see the future in the past. It feels wrong to even suggest that Lazuli’s influence and impact on her has wavered, even a fraction. She understands, as a leader, in a way that she couldn’t before, that love has to be put to the side. That love has to come second, sometimes, when there is so much at stake. She understands that Lazuli loved her with all her heart, she knows that like a prayer, as if it is as inherent to her as her name: but she knows that Luzuli’s head rested in the battlefield more often that she ever admitted.

Lazuli was so much to so many and it is a strange thing, to have loved a legend. Caramelinda rests easy in the shadow of King Amethar, the Unfallen. She hides behind his broad shoulders and pulls the strings that make his kingdom dance to the correct tune, and that is how they work together. In another world, she sits in a study with Lazuli, happily married. Caramelinda daydreams like this often - twists Lazuli’s powers into her own foolish hopes, knowing all too well that out of all the futures Lazuli could see, she likely never even entertained this, knowing the odds against them. Still, she imagines it - hand in hand, curled up together on a chair as Lazuli reads, victorious in war and safe in the harbor of their love, of their kingdom, of their perfect life. Lazuli would kiss her so sweetly and smile in that knowing way of hers, and what Caramelinda wouldn’t give to be mad at her one more time.

Or, well,  _ no.  _

She knows that she would have to sacrifice for this future to be a reality - she’d be giving up Jet and Ruby. The one trade she wouldn’t make, through all of this: her girls. Her wonderful, perfect daughters. In the death of Lazuli and Rococoa and Citrina and Sapphira ( _ there’s been so many women greater than herself fall before her eyes,  _ Caramelinda is forced to remember) she was promised to Amethar, a union of mourning and arguing and two broken people standing in the rubble and ashes of the lives they had envisioned. Their united front was a facade, for the most part. They disagreed on so much, but never this: the greatest thing in both of their lives, past, present and future: Jet and Ruby Rocks.

Jet.

Ruby.

Ruby without Jet, a life that she has never known. A whole made half. A bond broken, a twin taken away. Caramelinda without Jet, a mother’s love with no recipient for it. Amethar, cursed to be Unfallen. 

Amethar and Caramelinda, together. Parents who outlive their children: the cruelest fate of all.

And then, the cries come from Caramelinda’s throat, torn from her forcefully and she’s wailing like a beast, her hand clasped over her mouth to muffle her sobs because the sounds of violence are growing closer and  _ something has gone wrong, we should have had longer, I only just got them back, they were just in my arms a moment ago --  _ a thousand thoughts, no time at all to think them. She steadies her breathing, looks around the room she finds herself in. Tries to think of what to do, how to be useful, how to be the Queen.

She has entered into a new world in an instant. She has become a new person. A revelation in all the worst ways, all because a mother knows. A mother feels. A mother aches and cries silently in the rooms of her castle, filled with knowledge she feels but does not know, or knows but does not understand, or knows but can’t find the details of. Innate knowledge given to her through the pain in her stomach where Jet grew for nine long months. A ghost of a hand pressed into her left palm, the one Jet held onto for eighteen short years.

Jet Rocks, the heir to the throne of Candia, is dead. Her daughter. Ruby Rocks is somewhere else, alone, presumably, for the first time in her life.

And Caramelinda rises to her feet.

Caramelinda rises, because she has seen five other potential Queens of Candia fall.

Caramelinda rises, because Amethar is not the only Unfallen.

**Author's Note:**

> crown of candy has RUINED ME. EMOTIONALLY.


End file.
